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What is philosophy? — Simon Critchley

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From what human need does philosophy emerge? And where can it lead us?

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor of Philosophy at the New School in New York, and a scholar of Heidegger, Pessoa, Football (Liverpool FC), humour. He crosses over between analytic and continental traditions and freely draws on quotes from Hume and British pop bands.

Simon argues that philosophy begins in disappointment, not wonder. But it does not end there, its goals can be wisdom, knowledge, enlightenment, and freedom. Its concerns can be yet more varied: it can work as a tool for developing scientific theories, for exposing ideology, or for tracing the underpinnings of language and experience. Anywhere where other fields fear to tread, that’s where philosophers step in.

Since recording with Simon, one question has kept turning over in my head: how important is context to the understanding of philosophical ideas? An issue we discussed towards the end of the interview and did not quite have sufficient time to loop around as many times as I would have liked.

On the one hand, I believe in such things as facts and truth. I believe that science and some philosophical reasoning can deliver us these — although I recognize that belief cannot be justified beyond doubt. It is an act of faith. However, certain types of things, for example, facts concerning the laws of physics, I take to be impervious to our attitudes and human concerns. Why we believe them, and why we even look for them, are valid sociological and phenomenological questions. Yet the evidence for these facts can be produced usefully without any reference to historical context and the facts themselves do not depend on human factors.

In this way, to the question of whether the sun existed before humans — the subject of a heated discussion between Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille and A J Ayer in a Parisian bar — my answer is yes.

And yet.

There are questions that philosophy asks about issues that have no basis in fact. Impossible objects.

I recently asked ChatGPT to produce some predictions about the future for a project I am working on (What Year is Now? A Hallucinatory Horological Mapping). There are some obvious errors with the below — the tercentenary of the first interdimensional travel falling in 2307 would imply we first made that leap back in 2007. I suppose that’s possible if the dimension in question is time.

More interesting is what is predicted for 2306:

2306: Interdimensional exploration reveals the nature of existence itself

ChatGPT

I do not think that will happen. I don’t think it can. Determining the nature of existence is a question we cannot solve, even though there is value in turning it over, the value is not to get to an answer. It’s a means justify the ends (and btw there are no ends) sort of question.

For questions like this, and more particularly questions about the meaning of existence, context is important. Consider also questions in ethics and meta-ethics. There are no truths to be had here, and what is right for society — perhaps even the right way of thinking for society — will depend on that society. For example, in times of high uncertainty, where predictions are costly and inaccurate (perhaps this moment?) we might have reasons to consider virtue ethics over consequentialist frameworks.

Does it matter that I write this on Sunday morning, in 2023, in a stony city, that the sun — prehistoric or not — is hidden by several layers of cloud? It’s not for me to say.

Some links

Moments

(00:00) Intro
(3:00) Beginning of conversation: disappointment as the start of the journey
(7:55) Punk & Philosophy
(11:20) Trauma and tabula rasa
(12:30) Not making it in a band, becoming a philosopher
(19:30) Wittgenstein as a bridge between analytic and continental philosophy
(21:50) Mill and the origin of the label “continental philosophy”
(24:30) Philosophy has a duty to be part of culture
(28:00) The difficulty with philosophy being an academic tradition
(29:30) The Stone
(32:30) Football as a phenomenon for study that invites people in to philosophy
(35:00) Philosophy as pre-theoretic & Pessoa’s Ultimatum
(39:00) Will analytic philosophy run out for road and be subsumed into science?
(41:00) Two lines of human imagination
(42:00) Should philosophy ever be a single honours subject, or should it always aid other realms of thought?
(43:00) Philosophy as pre-science
(44:30) Phenomenology as reflection on the lived world
(47:00) Alberto Caeiro (Pessoa) and anti-poetry
(48:50) The saying of ordinary things to fascinate angels
(54:00) Impossible objects will keep philosophers busy
(57:00) The task of philosophy as deflationary, as not making progress
(1:00:00) Should philosophy of physics be part of physics?
(1:04:30) Context: What can’t I read Descartes like I’m talking to your right now?
(1:06:00) Is context colour or is it inseparable from ideas?
(1:15:30) Rorty: Continental philosophy as proper names vs problems in analytic philsophy
(1:19:20) Trying to walk the line between two traditions of philosophy
(1:20:00) Obscurantism vs scientism
(1:23:00) Permission to think on their own, to expose ideology
(1:26:00) The internet has been good for philosophy
(1:26:30) Audio as a new platform or agora for philosophy

ChatGPT as a Glider — James Intriligator

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Large language models, such as ChatGPT are poised to change the way we develop, research, and perhaps even think (see The Offshoring of Thought and Memory). But how do we best understand LLMs to get the most from our prompting?

Thinking of LLMs as deep neural networks, while correct, is not very useful in practical terms. It doesn’t help us interact with them, rather as thinking of human behavior as nothing more than the result of neurons firing won’t make you many friends. However, thinking of LLMs as search engines is also faulty — they are notoriously unreliable for facts.

Some other models have been proposed:

  • LLMs are “stochastic parrots” as Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, and (Sh)Mitchell argue
  • ChatGPT is “A fuzzy JPEG of the web” according to Ted Chiang

These both capture something of how they work, but they do not provide any direction on how to create prompts.

Our guest this week is James Intriligator. James trained as a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard, but then gravitated towards design and is currently Professor of the Practice in Human Factors Engineering and Director of Strategic Innovation at Tufts University. 

James proposes viewing ChatGPT not as a search engine, parrot, or JPEG, but as a “glider” that journeys through knowledge. By guiding it through diverse domains, it learns your interests and customizes better answers. Dimensional prompts activate specific areas like medicine or economics. 

I believe we’ll need to have various mental models to understand how best to interact with LLMs. This is one for the toolbox.

Links:

Generative Art using GPT4 #2: 3D fractals

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Click for full size, interactive version

There’s a serendipitous quality to experimenting with LLMs.

I was trying to make an interactive model of a Mandelbulb with ChatGPT. Although it didn’t work as intended, it produced something funky. Indeed, for making art their fallibility might be a feature and not a bug.

Here’s a tip for making HTML5 from code generated by LLMs:

  • It will get stuff wrong — frequently things won’t render at all
  • Paste the results into a text file, save as .html, open in Chrome, open the Developer Tools Panel in Chrome
  • If you have any errors they will be listed (see below) paste them into Chat GPT or your LLM of choice. Let it figure out what went wrong.

Generative Art using GPT4 #1: fractals

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Mandelbrot Fractal Zoom

To produce something for many people was once an expensive endeavor, capital was required to open a factory or obtain a printing press.

If you’re reading this, you probably own a factory and a printing press. It’s the object attached to this screen. But you might need workers to help you turn ideas into products. This is where LLMs can help.

I’ve long been fascinated with fractals, these entities so rich in detail that they seem to live between dimensions as if overspilling the plane but not filling the volume. But I’d never bother coding them, the idea was enough, the work was too much.

With ChatGPT4 I created the above HTML5 fractal in a few steps, starting with the prompt to use the Multiverses palette:

Draw a Mandelbrot fractal using the palette #A66021 #07091C #19837E #11C55A #FFFD34 #B9FB4F #732401

Using the Code Interpreter this, pleasingly, produces an image in the ChatGPT window using Python. A few more prompts created one in HTML5 that zooms on click with overlay text that disappears.

What I’m feeling right now is a fractal sense of accomplishment — I’d be more proud if I’d coded this from scratch — to have been an artisan rather than a foreman. I’ve overspilled the plane, but not filled the volume.

Phylogeny & The Canterbury Tales — Peter Robinson

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The physical solidity of books encourages notions of “the text” or “the canonical edition”. The challenges to this view from post-modernist thought are well known. But there are other ways in which this model of a static text may fail. Our guest this week is Peter Robinson (my dad!) who takes us through his work … Read more

MV#11 — AI, risk, fairness & responsibility — John Zerilli

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AI is already changing the world. It’s tempting to assume that AI will be so transformative that we’ll inevitably fail to harness it correctly, succumbing to its Promethean flames. While caution is due, it’s instructive to note that in many respects AI does not create entirely new challenges but rather exacerbates or uncovers existing ones. … Read more

Plants, Roots, Spirals and Palaeobotany — Sandy Hetherington

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Plants have transformed the surface of the earth and the contents of our atmosphere. To do this they’ve developed elaborate systems of roots and branches which (sometimes) follow uncanny mathematical patterns such as the Fibonacci sequence. Sandy Hetherington leads Edinburgh’s Molecular Palaeobotany and Evolution Group, they take a no-holds-barred approach to understanding plant development by … Read more

MV#9 — The Hunt for H2 — Rūta Karolytė

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For many years scientific consensus has averred that hydrogen does not occur naturally in significant quantities without being bound to other atoms (such as in H20, water, or CH4, methane). To obtain the gas — whether as a fuel or for use in fertilizers — we need to strip it from those molecules — typically by electrolysis and steam reformation. But our understanding may be ripe for change.

Website of National Renewable Energy Laboratory from February 2023, following the publication of a New York Times article on natural H2, the text was changed to “Because hydrogen typically does not exist freely in nature” (emphasis mine)

Rūta Karolytė is at the vanguard of prospectors looking for large, naturally occurring reservoirs of hydrogen. She’s a researcher from Oxford specializing in the geochemistry of the Earth and she enlightens us to the mechanisms that are likely to be producing hydrogen in the crust: radiolysis and serpentinization. 

In reviewing the evidence for naturally occurring hydrogen we pass through exotic terrain: a Soviet-era theory of hydrocarbon production, fairy rings, hydrothermal vents and chemosynthetic life. These organisms, remarkably, do not depend on the sun, plants, or any other life forms for their energy. Instead, they draw directly from the power stored in inorganic compounds. Their existence is testimony to the natural occurrence of hydrogen.

This does not guarantee that hydrogen is present in large quantities, but modeling of the processes that produce it — particularly serpentinization — suggests it is. Serpentinization is a kind of rusting whereby rocks are oxidized and hydrogen is freed from water molecules, wherever water and the right kinds of rocks are present and the pressure and temperature are right, hydrogen will be produced. What is more this process could be sped up by the introduction of more water underground.

If Rūta and her fellow prospectors are correct, the tapping of natural hydrogen could have transformative consequences for the “Hydrogen economy” — such as cutting out the substantial fossil fuel emissions associated with deriving fertilizers from methane or creating a cheap basis for building synthetic fuels.

In the first half of the show, we also delve into carbon sequestration — another cool climate topic. But I’ve got so excited writing up the first half, that I’ll leave it here. 

References